


muscle memory

by Cards_Slash



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Extremely Dubious Consent, F/M, M/M, Sibling Incest, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-27
Updated: 2016-04-27
Packaged: 2018-06-04 19:09:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6671593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He remembers nothing, but she tells him that he is Ezio Auditore and he is an assassin and that he loved her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	muscle memory

**Author's Note:**

> written for the prompt:
> 
> Person A has amnesia and Person B nurses them back to health because they've loved A for years. Except. surprise! Person A had never been in a relationship with Person B, but Person B tells them that they did and A only forgot. But, whatever gender B is, A does not even swing that way but A believes B because they sort of remember being friends and why would B lie, anyway?

1.  
Memory was a funny, fleeting, impermanent thing. He could remember the texture of paper and the smell of the flowers that grew by the villa. There was familiarity in the weapons that he was given to carry and the clothes that fit him like skin. Yes, and he could remember the taste of the food he liked the best and the particular sort of wine he favored. The things he lost were funny: his name, his purpose, his tragedies, and his victories. They sat around him as freshly painted pictures, each of them daring him to give them a name.

2.  
Every man was a stranger in this new world where he had woken up with no memory. Every voice was a shock to his ears. The very walls of the villa were made of a maze that seemed impossible to memorize inside the battered confines of his skull. When the afternoon birds sang beyond the open windows, he sat in the room of the woman they said was his Mother and he watched her rest on her knees with her head bent and her fingers clutching a rosary. He thought, _how sad_ she was and he should have known _why_. 

3\.   
Muscle memory seemed that it would not betray him. It saw him through training in the mornings when Mario-with-one-eye shouted angry slurs at his back. He called him _Ezio!_ with familiarity that was not comforting. Mario’s hand was gruff and constant, slapping his shoulder as his good eye stayed wet and curious—always peering into his face to find some sense of recognition.

But,

He had lost his name and he felt like a stranger in the company of these men, uncomfortably kept in an unknown group.

There was no reprieve from it; the constant nag of their worrying anticipation. 

4.  
Solace was quiet evenings. With the flicker of candles or the sparse light that came through his windows as the sun set. The crackle of a fire and distant sound of still-moving life beyond the villa kept him company; near but not demanding. He spent the time with his body, relearning the shape and size of himself. 

His thumbs were rough-as-rocks, his arms and back thick with muscle. His scars crossed his chest and his arms and he wondered at what sort of man he had been. (When he tried, he thought he could remember, _red_ , like a great river.)

5.  
‘Go now,’ Claudia said when she sent away the men that came to collect him. ‘Go and leave him be!’ When they were gone, grumbling at being dismissed, she sat on the arm of the chair he had taken to hiding in and she stroked her fingers through his hair. Her voice was sweetest song. ‘They mean well but they are idiots. They are floundering without you.’

He tipped his head to see her and her fingers slid from his hair. A slim finger slid beneath his clothes to brush across a hidden scar. ‘Was I so important?’

‘Yes, once.’

6.  
‘Tell me,’ he said with the bitterness of lost things balled his fists in rage. ‘Tell me what I was. Tell me why I am covered in these!’ He had abandoned his clothes in favor of finding her.

Claudia’s was hardly dressed, sitting with a brush dangling from one hand as she looked over her shoulder at him. ‘Impatient,’ she said to him. ‘You have always been, Ezio.’

‘Tell me! Do not speak in riddles—of shadows and Templars and nonsense!’ He pulled her around to look at him. All his strength was another lost memory.

‘You were an assassin.’

7.  
‘Come,’ she said after dinner. ‘I cannot stand to watch you pout. You look like a giant child. Walk with me, keep me safe.’ There was no question in her motion that she would be obeyed, no thought in her head that he wouldn’t follow her.

He went because it was muscle memory.

‘It is maddening,’ she said when they stopped to watch the sun dip below the horizon. ‘To be so close to someone I know so well, and for them to be a stranger.’

‘Do you miss him, whoever I once was?’

She smiled, pink and sad, ‘yes.’

8.  
She lingered in the doorway with her fingers caught in his. ‘Stay with me,’ she whispered. 

He could not remember his name or his face but he thought he remembered the lovers-old-heartache that curled her slim-tipped-fingers through his. He thought there was an answering loneliness inside of him that matched the one that showed on her. ‘What were we?’ he asked her when there was nobody but the walls to hear them. ‘You and I, really?’

‘Don’t you remember?’ Her hand touched his face and he tipped his head down his forehead kissed against hers. She said, ‘we were lovers once.’

9.  
There was permanence in the idea of her. There was no memory to give credence to that feeling of _solid_ reality around her but she persisted with the same predictability as his favorite wine. 

Yes, he loved her.

And she took his hand and she pulled him to her bed. Her voice was familiar against his ear as her fingers traced his history in the lines of his scarred skin. When he was naked, she smiled at him (oh so sweetly).

Claudia said, ‘I love you, I always have,’ as she pulled him over her. ‘Do you remember loving me?’

10.  
‘Did I enjoy it?’ 

In the morning, Claudia had knots in her hair to match his own. She was dainty, half-asleep, smiling at him from where she pressed her cheek to the pillow. But there was history in her face, trapped behind the uncertain worry of her half-smile. ‘Which thing?’

‘Killing,’ he said. It had occurred to him, his room was a shrine to the men who had died by his hand. Absent the emotion and memory, it was an unnerving gallery to keep him company while he slept.

‘No, but we don’t always like the things we must do.’

11.  
He did not remember horses, but his body remembered how to ride them. The man at the stable had only relented out of the familiarity of obeying.

‘Find your way home,’ the man said.

He spent the afternoon in the countryside, finding contentment in the freedom of existing beyond expectation, time or place. He was simply alive, in the grass, laying in the shadow of the horse happily feasting on an early lunch. 

So he thought, if he laid very still, in the sunshine, that he might find all the bits and pieces of himself still shattered inside his head.

12.  
There was no innocence in the way that Claudia touched him. Her fingers were quick and slim, sliding beneath his clothes in every room of the house. She touched the nape of his neck and she stroked his hair. 

He thought, he could remember a lifetime of the touch of her hands, always pulling at his hair. He could remember an infinity of her voice in his ears. ‘Did I believe in God?’ he asked when the house had gone to bed.

She pulled him to her room and whispered, ‘you knew there is no God,’ into his naked ear.

13.  
Mario caught him in the morning, shouting, ‘enough of this, Ezio! Enough. You must remember!’ His hands were heavy-as-hammers, resting on his arms. His fingers like vices and the words another unwanted demand. 

(He remembered, well enough, how beaten his body had been when he woke up in this place.)

It was muscle memory, like instinct, that threw Mario. Flight-or-fight that followed after him, with curled fist and practice motion. There was no knowing his intention without having memory of his abilities; but they were interrupted by many men—all of them (all at once) shouting: 

‘Ezio! Ezio, stop! Ezio!’

14\.   
Claudia slid into his bath, up against him in the murky water, with her lips against his neck. His (bruised) hands curled around the rim of the tub as he tipped his head to look at her. 

‘He’s fine,’ she said, ‘he doesn’t blame you. You are not the only Auditore that suffers impatience.’ Her hands pulled at his wrists, the way her words pulled at his guilt. 

‘You would not lie to me.’ He wondered if he remembered that or if he were only guessing. He wondered if he had ever known what the flinch of her eyebrows meant.

15.  
Unknown things robbed him of sleep. It dragged him from comfortable beds to wander isolated, empty halls after dark. He busied himself with nonsense; he sat in a library that gave him no answers, picking up books he did not think he would have read.

He touched the weapons and armor that kept places of honor in the villa. He picked up well-kept swords, testing the weight like relearning the body of a lover.

He ran in the gray morning light, like working off an agitation. It followed him, on steady feet, nagging and nagging and nagging at his heels. 

16\.   
If his Mother had cared for him once, it seemed to him that she had forgotten him the way he had forgotten her.

If he could call himself Ezio, if he could own that name and the person that his body had once been, he thought he would fall on his knees at her side with his great-heavy-arms and his murder-roughed-hands and he would beg her for peace.

Mario stood in the doorway of Mother’s room, with his black-blue bruises and said, ‘I have sent for someone that will help you,’ as if he had finally given up on hope.

17.  
‘No,’ he said when Claudia came to his room. There was no sanctuary in his life, no place he felt _safe_ from the haunting of his forgotten life. He held her back with one hand against the front of her nightshirt and felt the wild throbbing of her heart. ‘Not here.’ It seemed as foolish to him (who said it) as it seemed to her. 

‘What difference is it?’ she asked him.

‘Not here,’ he said because he could not name the reason his skin prickled and his gut twisted. 

‘Then come,’ she said and pulled him to her bed.

18.  
Leonardo came at the end of a rainy week, when he was mad from being held indoors. Leonardo came with a sunny smile and sweet-brown freckles. He stood, soaked through to the bones, with wet-strings of blonde hair and pink glow to his cheeks. Water dripped off his sleeves and his fingertips as he spread his hands. There was thickness in his voice, like well-tended _agony_ , undercutting the attempted joy when he said, ‘my friend.’ But quieter, and _softer_ , when they were closer, Leonardo did not touch him but say, ‘it has been too long.’

He said, ‘has it?’

‘Always.’

19.  
Leonardo was a light that he could not resist. And he found him, with perfect accuracy, everywhere he looked. Leonardo sitting with his back to a wall, with pink cheeks and a sad-sad chuckle in his throat when he was discovered. There was no name to put to the smile on Leonardo’s face as he sat at his side. 

(But there _were_ names for the things his body felt; with their shoulders pushed together.)

‘I told you once that you were an ignorant tease.’

‘I am not—‘

‘Ignorant,’ Leonardo finished for him. He nodded, ‘but you _are_ a tease.’ 

20.  
‘Will I ever remember?’ he asked Leonardo. They were not alone, but sitting on the steps in the sunlight, watching the men with practice swords in the yard. ‘Will I like what I remember?’

Leonardo was leaning forward with his long-long back in arch and his elbows to his knees. He closed his eyes while he thought, working the problem over with long fingers twisting up the thick and unpleasant grass he’d plucked. ‘I think you will remember, I do not think you will like everything you find. You have suffered; you have lost. But there is good, I think.’

21.  
Claudia had given him space but she invaded his bed with hurried hands. Her breath was raw with tears and manufactured desperation. Her hands were _possessive_ and _snake-like_ , invading him. 

He held her back, with fists around her slim wrists. 

She leaned her weight against the grip, lurching toward him. ‘I wish you remembered how you loved me, how happy we were.’

There was no light in her, no memory of his body coming alive under her touch (save for the lukewarm ones he had remade) but he was not Ezio (who his body had been). ‘Not here,’ he said.

22.  
But there were bruises on Claudia’s wrists in the morning. The echo of them stuck on Leonardo’s slow-frowning face across the breakfast table. If anyone else had noticed, they made no note of them. 

He could not name the sense of _shame_ that followed him away from the table, that nagged him in the halls, that drove him to sit in the chair in the room of Ezio’s Mother, watching her mouth words to a God that might not exist. It followed him, in and out of the day, perched on his shoulders. 

It dragged him slowly into darkness.

23.  
Muscle memory did not fail him. 

He could climb, run, and _fight_. Every skill his body remembered was an unknown advantage. 

But he was full of holes, and black spots. He was ragged with unknowable _guilt_ that drove him like a madman, pacing back-and-forth and back-and-forth again across the uneven floor of his room. It caught him beneath the ribs where his heart beat on-and-on, animating the corpse of a man who died. 

When he could contain it no longer, he tore at the walls. He screamed and beat his fists and broke the trappings of _Ezio_ ’s life to pieces. 

24.  
Leonardo was a flickering light in the darkness; appearing with a candle and careful footsteps that carried him across the wreckage. He was a steady weight, a real memory, close but not crowding. There was no demand in his presence.

‘Claudia would not lie to me,’ it had been his only truth, in all these dark days.

But Leonardo’s arm was around his shoulder (steadying, sturdy) as he said, “Ezio—” There was a million words in that single one; the whole truth unfolding. Every lie and every misuse exposed and writhing under his skin.

‘Don’t,’ Ezio said. ‘Please don’t.’


End file.
